A Shared Telos? Two Paths of Becoming God: Technology and Cooperation

Ethan Schimmoeller, MD candidate, MA candidate in bioethics, Student, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, The Ohio State University

The recently published book, Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Lessons from Belgium, concludes that, since legalization in 2002, “death by euthanasia in Belgium is…regarded as a normal death and a benefit not to be restricted.” Whereas the normal secular death increasingly comes under the domain of decision via ‘physician-assistance’, can robust, traditional religion reveal an alternative that reaches beyond lifeless moralism? More fundamentally, do secular medicine and Christianity possibly share teleology? This paper will reflect upon dying, transcendence, and breathing Life into dead matter.

Medicine has embraced a technological paradigm of asserting mastery over nature, as evidenced by the clear turn in recent years toward euthanasia and assisted suicide. In the language of George Grant, making and knowing have fused into willing, resulting in techne-logos as much more than neutral instrument for relieving the human estate. Technology, rather, captures our assumption of mastery over nature, and consequently forms the very paradigm for knowledge, resulting in artificial necessity. Past ‘givens’ of human life, namely, death, thus present themselves as obligatory objects to be mastered by the will to power. Nature, especially the body, is seen as formless and void until the will can transform it. In the language of medical ethics today, physicians present value-free facts to autonomous patients who must impose subjective value upon them. With post-Darwinian biology proclaiming man to merely result from chance and dead matter, assisted-dying provides the final vehicle for an appropriate, reciprocal conclusion.

If only in the collective mind, the will has triumphed in asserting itself to construct reality. Humanism quickly evolves into trans-humanism by uniting the will to power with cybernetics to take an evolutionary leap: the post-human god emancipated from natural necessity and givens, with the will to define the terms of its own existence. Technology, as paradigm for our era, is the new religion, promising to transform us into immanent gods.

These ends of mastery hearken to ‘becoming partakers of the Divine nature.’ By cooperation, rather than mastery, Christ promises to transform each believer into God by participation, making us ‘sons in the Son.’ The living God, who comes to us hidden as bread and wine, shows that true God-ness requires ‘humbling oneself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.’ Thus, euthanasia and the immanent post-human god are exposed as hollow and lifeless by the true God-man, who unites immanence and transcendence.

If we are to take this authentic Divinization seriously, Christians must not embrace a technological stance towards the world. Rather, we ought to energetically become ‘obedient unto death’ and care for the dying. This posture will open the door to demonstrating a better way to die in the prospect of euthanasia becoming the normative death in this country.